"New" Shakespeare likeness

The Washington Post has a long article on the Cobbe portrait:

Just two images of Shakespeare are considered authentic by scholars, and both were done after the playwright died. [. . .] Both depictions are so unintelligent-looking that scholars blame them for instigating the Author Controversy, which is not really a controversy so much as a campaign by conspiracy-minded amateurs to prove that someone more visually appealing wrote the plays. The thinking goes that the "peculiar dough-faced man" in the Droeshout, as Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University calls him, is too stolid to have written such soaring words. Someone else must have, preferably someone good-looking. As scholar Marjorie Garber writes, "We'd rather he not look like an egghead."

The Author Controversy persists despite considerable documentary evidence. We have the man from Stratford's pay stubs for performing at court, his certificate of occupancy for the Globe Theatre, and his will, in which he left memorial rings to some London actors. Funny he would do that if he was just a country burgher who didn't write the plays.

Still, it would help to have a decent picture of the man in his prime to keep the conspiracy theorists at bay. [. . .]

Ending No. 1: It's him. Someone discovers proof. [. . .] In which case our view of Shakespeare must shift. He is no bourgeois pudge but rather neck-deep in romantic and political intrigue, until he is forced back to the humdrum of Stratford only grudgingly, by some disgrace. [. . .]

"Sometimes people say, 'Well, does it matter what people looked like?'" Wells says. "Well, of course it matters. It's why we have portrait galleries. It's why we want to know what Shelley and Keats looked like -- and sometimes they look as we would like them to look."

Recent genetics publications

John Hawks comments on a questionable paper attempting to model the spread of lactase persistence.

Dienekes links to a recent, open-access autosomal SNP clustering paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups (doi: 10.2119/molmed.2009.00094).

Paul Gottfried hates "WASP" people

Update: This article puts Brewster's remarks (made years after Gottfried completed his PhD, and which said nothing about "unqualified" support) into context:

On March 19 national Panther chief of staff David Hilliard set the tone for the coming weeks in a speech to 2,000 students at the University of Connecticut. "Not only will we burn buildings," Hilliard vowed, "we will take lives." [. . .] Memos traveled from office to office within the FBI warning of violence-bent crazies descending on New Haven. "As many as half a million persons," said one FBI teletype. [. . .] On April 15, in Cambridge, 1,500 demonstrators showed up for a march at Harvard -- only to find the Harvard gates along their parade route locked shut. Incensed demonstrators smashed windows, threw rocks, lit fires. Some 214 people were hospitalized; $100,000 worth of property was destroyed. At the rally, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman vowed that marchers would burn down Yale on May 1.

The patricians entrusted with Yale University's future knew it was time to swing into action.

The evidence suggests Brewster was acting out of "pragmatic" spinelessness in the face of violent agitation by radical Jews and blacks, rather than "white guilt".


At Takimag, Paul Gottfried (proud father of one of Sonia Sotamayor's speechwriters) posts a rambling screed against "WASPs", the substance of which follows:

There is now a debate over on the unauthorized right between zealous critics of Jewish influence in Western countries and those who, like myself, believe that WASPdom has destroyed itself. To put my cards on the table: I’ve never heard American Jews or American blacks pour as much contempt on white Protestant America as I hear coming from white Protestant intellectuals and clergypersons.

Seriously? Gottfried must not hear well, or must be very selective in what he chooses to remember.

One of my most vivid graduate school memories was listening to a speech given by Yale President Kingman Brewster expressing unqualified support for the Black Panthers. I recall being shocked to hear this direct linear descendant of two founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony [sic] behave like such a jerk. But Brewster was certainly not a more extreme anti-racist than his fellow-patrician and Yale chaplain, William Sloan Coffin. This Congregationalist chaplain had trouble even finishing a sentence without deploring the slave trade in which his ancestors had once been implicated.

Whereas, presumably, Gottfried finds it perfectly natural and understandable for someone like David Horowitz to more than merely "express" support for the Black Panthers.

And if I think back hard enough, most of the WASP patricians whom I met at Yale as a graduate student were almost as whacky as Brewster and Coffin. Their pompous self-debasement had progressed so far then that they didn’t need Alan Dershowitz or Cornell West to come scourge them.

Did Gottfried ever stop to ask himself if "WASP patricians" interested in befriending or talking politics with a Jewish dwarf were representative of "WASP patricians" generally?

The tirades against WASP nativism and close-mindedness, often produced by their tribe, have caused me to wonder by what ethereal standard these critics are judging their past. What other group in world history has been more “tolerant” or less hostile to outsiders than were white Protestants? Although some of their progenitors had engaged in the slave trade, so had the rest of the human race, and particularly blacks for a far longer time. And only WASPs feel guilty about social institutions that most other groups have taken for granted. Needless to say, these other groups are all too happy to browbeat masochistic Westerners about doing what everyone else has done.

A Steve Sailer commenter recently mused:

I've oftened wondered why certain Jews seem to bear such overwhelming hostility for a country and its people that have been far more hospitable to them than any other place on Earth. It's almost as if they hold us in contempt for not hating them.

Whether or not this observation holds true for the typical Jew, it seems to apply perfectly to Gottfried. No doubt "WASPs" were excessively tolerant (even during the era of "quotas", Jews remained overrepresented at elite colleges), but as a group, they were never the cartoonish masochists Gottfried paints them as. By the time Gottfried was in college, American society had already been radically transformed with plenty of help from Jews. I also find people like Brewster and Coffin contemptible, but to pretend they were the source of the wave of social change they were riding is highly disingenuous. While "patrician WASP" William Sloane Coffin, Jr., came to national prominence in connection with "freedom riders", "it is estimated that half of the white Freedom Riders were Jewish" (source), and Yale alumni took issue with Coffin's activism, many calling for his removal as chaplain. Coffin was, in fact, influenced by and surrounded with Jews. In Warren Goldstein's William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience, we learn:

Coffin quickly came to the attention of his elders. During his junior year he worked for the Yale Law School Professor Eugene V. Rostow [Jew] in a campaign on behalf of the Stratton Bill, an ultimately--though very modestly--successful proposal to allow greater numbers of European DPs, especially Jews, to enter the United States. Rostow, who had been Connecticut chairman of the effort, wrote a letter introducing Coffin to such foreign policy mandarins as Dean Acheson and Chester Bowles

(In other words, Coffin's connections were not merely the result of his "patrician WASP" background.)

Coffin's adoption of neo-orthodox "Hebraism" had unforeseen consequences: an emphasis on "prophetic Christianity" (which he knew little about because he never studied the prophets in seminary) and his openness to ecumenism, particularly as regarded Jews. For the whole notion of a "Judeo-Christian" heritage and creed, according to the historian Mark Silk, was literally created and publicized in the face and wake of fascist anti-Semitism by Christian and Jewish neo-orthodox theologians ranging from Niebuhr and his Union colleague Paul Tillich to Jewish Theological seminary's Abrahama Joshua Heschel and the more popular Will Herberg.

[. . .] Coffin was bored. He was also offended by the discrimination against Jews that he saw on Campus and in the fraternity system. His own casual anti-Semitism had been challenged in Europe, where he had visited Buchenwald after the war. "What the Germans did to the Jews was to me so appalling and so shocking," he recalled, "that we should fight a war condemning the Nazis for the horrors they perpetrated, particularly against the Jews, and then come back and have country clubs that didn't take Jews. It was absolutely outrageous to me."

[. . .] Coffin attacked the fraternities on a variety of grounds but mainly because they discriminated, either explicitly or implicitly, against Jews and blacks as well as against those outside a "narrow range of associates."

[. . .] Coffin soon got a chance to have a significant effect on the matter of Jewish students at Yale. Yale's new Hillel director, Rabbi Richard Israel, who arrived a year after Coffin, had been trying to find out if a quota limited Jewish admissions at Yale. While the number was not public knowledge, the percentage of Jews had hovered int he range of 10 to 15 percent for quite a long time, while at both Harvard and Cornell Jews made up nearly 25 percent of the undergraduate student body. Prodded by Israel, Coffin went to see Griswold and eventually got the information. He had been convinced that Yale's numbers fell substantially below Princeton's and Williams's, but the facts showed otherwise: Yale's Class of 1963 (which had entered in 1959) had roughly 11.5 percent Jews, about the same as the Class of 1964 at Princeton and a little higher than that at Williams. [. . .] But neither Coffin nor Israel let the matter drop. Coffin discussed the question of Jewish admissions with a number of administration officials. His notes on meeting with Dean William DeVane and Provost Buck indicated the persistence of stereotypes at the highest levels: "However bright not all Jewish applicants are 'beauties.' "Twerps,' said Buck. Personalities not always attractive, self-serving, aggressive. Lack of breadth of view."

[. . .] Moreover, while never abandoning his own Christianity, Coffin preached to Jews as well as gentiles at Yale and elsewhere. Profoundly influenced by the Ecumenical spirit of American religious activism in the early 1960s, Coffin lived in an ecumenical world, relied on ecumenical audiences, and worked on political issues in an ecumenical manner. While it shocked some Riverside Church members when Coffin hired a Jew to run the Disarmament Program, he himself gave the question no thought at all. Deeply affected by Heschel (and later by the Rabbi Marshall Meyer), and drawn above all to the Old Testament prophets (and Paul in the New Testament), Coffin preached a more open theology [. . .]

Coffin's first wife was half-Jewish, half-Catholic Eva Rubinstein (interesting spouse selection for a Protestant clergyman).

Incidentally, Coffin's great-grandfather was a Scottish immigrant. I don't find this fact hugely important, but I mention it for the benefit the handful of ignorant "Celtic"-identified types who fancy that American history is best conceived of as a battle between radical leftist pure-English northeastern Puritan "WASPs" and wholesome, conservative Scotch-Irish, Irish Catholics, friendly Jews, and the like.

German-identified types eager to rant about "WASPs" should note that the strongest non-Jewish influences on Coffin included a German immigrant (Paul Tillich) and the son of a German immigrant (Reinhold Niebuhr).

Some context on Kingman Brewster, from The guardians: Kingman Brewster, his circle, and the rise of the liberal establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice:

At this moment in American history, some leaders were aware that the nature of authority was changing. Brewster had moved Yale away from its deeply conservative New England roots, transforming it into a modern international institution. The university's culture, reflected in its policies in administration, faculty hiring, and undergraduate admissions, had long stressed the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership. Brewster reshaped Yale to emphasize merit rather than background. He redefined leadership to include individuals from nonprivileged circumstances, minorities, and women. Yet he did not turn his back on Yale's heritage, its hallowed tradition of community, or its distinctive reputation for producing leaders and achievers. He sought a middle course through the Sturm and Drang of the era--a difficult balancing act--and found himself pressed between impatient students and angry conservative alumni.

Kingman Brewster's story exemplified the experiences of the leadership class of "the greatest generation." Brewster and most of his friends and associates traced their ancestry to the New England colonists, and they shared backgrounds of at least modest privilege. Educated at a handful of private schools and colleges, they were brought together from an early age and throughout their lives. And they achieved leadership positions in careers and in institutions that historically had been tilted in favor of their class. [. . .]

Yet the establishment was not a monolith of ideas shared by a group of identically minded individuls. The dominant strain undoubtedly was the rock-ribbed Republicanism for which New England had been known. Men who inclined toward this view--including most of the leaders of Brewster's father's generation--generally tried to preserve the social and political privileges that their class enjoyed. This is to be expected; ruling classes typically attempt to reproduced themselves.

Yet, surprisingly, the establishment leaders of Brewster's generation were mostly liberals, who in different ways set out to reform the institutions and the society that had given them their advantages. In matters of appearance and custom, they were much like the older generations. [. . .] But they sensed and responded to the new generation's desire for a more just social order, what Brewster in his inaugural address called the yearning of the young "to be involve in something more meaningful than inherited patterns of success."

I don't accept the premise that "the establishment leaders of Brewster's generation were mostly liberals". (I'd like to see some stats and definitions of "establishment" and "leader". On the general question of the politics of rich "WASPs", see The Myth of Old Money Liberalism.) But the broader points, that (1) Brewster was responding to larger trends and (2) Brewster was not the most radical of leftists, are correct.

When the members of this new, liberal establishment came to positions of responsibility in the 1960s, their background conditioned their responses to the urban and racial crises, the trauma of the Vietnam War, and the alienation of the younger generation. None of them could have kept aloof from the problems of the 1960s even if they had wanted to. The disruption provoked by the era kept bubbling up into their spheres of politics, education, administration, diplomacy, philanthropy, and religion. Their responses followed similar patterns, for reasons that had to do with background and temperament, and the interactions among the elites.

Most important, perhaps, was the fact that Brewster and his friends though of themselves as society's guardians: modern leaders of the country's institutions, who had national responsibilities and tried to take a national perspective. As their conception of the national interest changed during the 1960s, they responded in ways that many other leaders, and people who shared their background, did not. At their best, these men held out the promise that they could overcome the flaws and prejudices of their fathers' generation while retaining the positive attributes of that old WASP elite. Their supporters praised them as pragmatic idealists, while their enemies damned them as oppressors or as traitors to their class.

[. . .] Subsequent years have not been kind to the reputations of the members of Brewster's establishment. When they are remembered at all, it is largely by their enemies, who recall them either as villains who promoted the Vietnam War or as social engineering elitists. Despite their best intentions, Brewster and his circle were divisive figures. They infuriated even some of the people they helped simply because of who they were, with their funny names, ingrained upper-class traits, polished intellects, high-minded liberalism, and the aura of natural superiority that derived, ironically, from the tradition of WASP leadership they helped undermine. "Vote for Elliot Richardson," read a bumper sticker printed by the Bostonian's electoral opponents, "he's better than you." Guardianship is an alien concept to most Americans, and the members of the establishment provoked a fierce resentment of liberals, intellectuals, and the like that continues to drive current poltiics.

(The bit about "ingrained upper-class traits" and "the aura of natural superiority" infuriating "even some of the people they helped" I suspect helps explain much of Gottfried's continued compulsion to trash Yale "WASPs" 40+ years after he left.)

Who shaped these men's "conception of the national interest [. . .] during the 1960s"? For that matter, where did they pick up their liberalism in the first place? In Brewster's case, at least, it certainly wasn't from his father:

Brewster [Sr.], described by one acquaintance as "a crustacean McKinleyite Republican," entertained many members of Congress at his Catoctin retreat. [. . .] Brewster's politics, however, were too extreme to be openly expressed in the mainstream GOP. His anti-Communism was so rabid and sweeping that his son remembered that "if I were considerate enough to visit him in Washington with a friend whose parents were somehow associated with the Roosevelt administration, it was natural that he should refer quite regularly to my 'Communist friends.'" [. . .] Brewster's political opinions and his business contacts with Germany led the FBI to start a file on him. While various information testified that he admired the Nazi system and claimed to have met personally with Hitler on visits to Germany, the FBI's investigation revealed little aside from the fact that "BREWSTER possessed a great hatred for Jews and regarded them with suspicion at all times."

Brewster's views on race and religion were perhaps most fully expressed in the works of his good friend the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, who believed that Anglo-Saxon civilization and America's ancestral purity were under threat from inferior races. Stoddard was, like Brewster, a Harvard Law School graduate and sometime resident of Brookline, Massachusetts. (Brookline was, not coincidentally, the location of the nation's first country club.) Stoddard's works included evocative titles such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man.

American society, according to Brewster and Stoddard, was a racial aristocracy under threat [. . .] Many upper-class East Coast gentlemen shared the view that snobbery and racial exclusion were necessary to preserve their elite culture, even if they stopped short of Stoddard's conclusion that "race cleansing is the obvious starting-point for race betterment." Although Brewster's virulent racial opinions were welcome in polite society, most of his peers expressed themselves in more decorous terms. [. . .]

Brewster Sr. was a strikingly handsome man, with a magnetic appeal to women. He was married five times, although the legality of several of those unions was questionable. [. . .] Kingman Jr. recalled that at his father's funeral, it was his role to keep the wives apart; they were all still fond of him.

Kingman Jr. once told an interviewer that he had been "terrified" of the father who had given him "a stepmother in every port." [. . .] The son detested his father's fascism and ultraconservatism, and so kept some distance. [. . .]

Kingman Sr.s paranoid racism, extreme anticommunism, and unbridled hatred of Franklin Roosevelt reflected an entire class's inability to cope with drastic change.

Some members of Kingman Jr.'s generation adopted the reactionary outlook of their fathers. Others turned against their class and toward communism and other radical philosophies. But Brewster and his cohorts in the liberal establishment would seek to change in order to preserve, in FDR's well-known formulation.

"WASPs" indeed were not monolithic in political opinion (whereas Jews were quite monolithic in their desire to tear down America as a "WASP" country).

Recording of a 1961 speech by Carleton Putnam

A commenter at HBD Books directed my attention to this audio recording:

Carleton Putnam, author of Race and Reason: A Yankee View giving a speech in Jackson Mississippi on 10/26/61 at a banquet held at the Olympic Room of the Heidelberg Hotel. In this speech Mr. Putnam addresses the following topics; timelessness of American ideals, integrity of the Jackson leadership and press, What is the Problem?, origins of equalitarianism [Franz Boas,Lysenkosim], persecution of legitimate scientists, UNESCO, race and environmentalist propaganda, the role of the church in the spread of equalitarian race doctrine, perverting Lincoln's words and ideas, northern indoctrination as "moral" crusade, integrity of civilisation, not states rights must be the defence for racial problems and leftist "change" [prophetic!]

Tangentially related: Several episodes of the 1950s television show "What in the World?", featuring Carleton Coon and other experts (inluding, in one instance, a surprisingly knowledgeable Vincent Price) attempting to place archaeological and ethnological artifacts, are now up on youtube (via Dienekes).

A program for estimating the proportion of Jewish names on a list

Here is the Windows version of Hoozajew 1.1: hoozajewPCf.zip. Newer versions of the program were released before the programmer's website was suppressed by the ADL in 2003, though I don't know what improvements may have been made. A pdf file that accompanies the release ("Counting Jews: An Onomastics Challenge") contains some background information and methodological details.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, pt. 7

A commenter at Steve Sailer's linked to this 2007 Jewish Journal article, which mixes ethnic triumphalism with whines about the "anti-Semitism" (and table manners) of the old Los Angeles elite.

Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.

Not just any Jew. Sam Zell looks as though he's one tough Jew, probably even tougher than the old California Clubbers who stole the water from the Owens Valley and got rich in sneaky San Fernando Valley land deals. [. . .]

However it turns out, we'll probably have a Jew in charge of the Times, which was once one of old Los Angeles' most famous WASP institutions. What a great day for old L.A. Jews with long memories of country clubs and downtown clubs that banned them; restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain fancy neighborhoods; anti-Semitic fraternities and sororities at USC and UCLA and law firms that never seemed able to find a place for a smart Jewish attorney. They also may have memories of the old Times, which, while not anti-Semitic, was a perfect reflection of the conservative Republican WASP culture of Los Angeles' upper classes. [. . .]

This was not the story told by most of those at the top levels of the Times when I got there in 1970. I was invited to luncheons for dignitaries in the most exclusive executive dining room. Everyone ate slowly and talked quietly. Silences were broken by the clink of expensive silverware. Nobody asked the dignitaries rude questions. I learned to eat slowly and not talk with my hands.

But the old Times was disappearing. Jews moved into top positions. As the years went on, one of our publishers was Dave Laventhol. We had a Jewish managing editor, a Jewish national editor and many other Jewish editors and reporters.

More than that, the grand lady of the Times, Dorothy Chandler, who was a daughter of a Long Beach merchant family and not part of the L.A. establishment, had made friends with Westside Jews. She was building the Music Center and figured that the culture-loving Jewish community would help finance the place. She helped Jews join the L.A. mainstream.

Even with the changes, there was something sedate, non-Jewish, about the Times. It was too dignified for a newspaper, too conscious of its long history. From the busts of the Chandlers in the Globe Lobby to the reception and dining rooms on the sixth floor, gravitas was deeply embedded in a building put up in 1934 during the era of rich WASP L.A. supremacy.

Interesting-sounding posters from 2009 ASHG meeting

Titles only -- abstracts aren't up (via Polak):

Accurate inference of individual ancestry geographic coordinates within Europe using small panels of genetic markers. P. Paschou, J. Lewis, P. Drineas.

Super Y-chromosomes in Eurasia and the impact of social selection and Neolithic transition. P. L. Balaresque, E. Heyer, M. A. Jobling.

Admixture between Ashkenazi Jews and Central Europeans. W. Klitz, L. Gragert, M. Maiers, M. Fernandez-Viña, Y. Ben-Naeh, G. Benedek, C. Brautbar, S. Israel.

Patterns of correlation between genetic ancestry and facial features suggest selection on females is driving differentiation. D. K. Liberton, K. A. Matthes, R. Pereira, T. Frudakis, D. A. Puts, M. D. Shriver.

Fine-scale Population Structure in Worldwide Ethnic Populations as Revealed by Identical by Descent Segments. B. M. Henn, L. Hon, J. M. Macpherson, N. Eriksson, A. Wojcicki, L. Avey, S. Saxonov, J. L. Mountain.

I doubt that 23andMe's presentation (last entry above) simply "pertains to the methodology behind their company's Ancestry Painting tool", as Polak speculates. Sounds like something more interesting. Update: I'm right. The abstract has been posted at 23andMe.

Fine-scale Population Structure in Worldwide Ethnic Populations as Revealed by Identity by Descent Segments

Brenna M. Henn1, Lawrence Hon1, JM Macpherson1, Nick Eriksson1, Anne Wojcicki1, Linda Avey1, Serge Saxonov1, Joanna L. Mountain1*

It is well established that human population genetic diversity reflects continental-level geographic divisions, and that within-continental geographic and linguistic differences contribute to population structure between regions. The continental and regional differences reflect ancient demographic events, such as early migrations Out of Africa into Eurasia. However, it is not clear how recent demographic processes occurring on the order of hundreds, rather than thousands, of years affect patterns of genomic diversity. We analyzed the sharing of DNA identical by descent (IBD) inferred from 580,000 SNPs using a large database of individuals with European ancestry, including a subset identifying as Ashkenazim. We also explored the pairwise distributions of identical by descent segments in populations from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH), a diverse set of ethnic groups from across the world. We observed that the average number and sizes of shared genomic segments differ substantially across the ~55 populations. The different patterns are likely attributable to differences in population histories such as recent bottlenecks and sub-structure. In particular, populations that are highly structured will contain individuals that share elevated amounts of IBD, indicative of recent common ancestry through multiple ancestors. In order to understand the pattern of the observed population-level sharing, we simulated extended pedigrees using empirical data from several populations and calculated the expected amounts of sharing for 1st through 10th cousins. We assumed random mating within each population for the simulations. Interestingly, the average sharing in the simulated distant cousins was consistently less than the observed average sharing in each population sample. This finding indicates the presence of fine-scale population structure for many ethnic groups, such as the Ashkenazim, within the last 10 generations (200-300 years).

Diet, dental reduction, and facial reduction

Compend Contin Educ Dent. 2009 Jun;30(5):292-300.

Origins of dental crowding and malocclusions: an anthropological perspective.

Eose JC, Roblee RD.

The study of ancient Egyptian skeletons from Amarna, Egypt reveals extensive tooth wear but very little dental crowding, unlike in modern Americans. In the early 20th century, Percy Raymond Begg focused his research on extreme tooth wear coincident with traditional diets to justify teeth removal during orthodontic treatment. Anthropologists studying skeletons that were excavated along the Nile Valley in Egypt and the Sudan have demonstrated reductions in tooth size and changes in the face, including decreased robustness associated with the development of agriculture, but without any increase in the frequency of dental crowding and malocclusion. For thousands of years, facial and dental reduction stayed in step, more or less. These analyses suggest it was not the reduction in tooth wear that increased crowding and malocclusion, but rather the tremendous reduction in the forces of mastication, which produced this extreme tooth wear and the subsequent reduced jaw involvement. Thus, as modern food preparation techniques spread throughout the world during the 19th century, so did dental crowding. This research provides support for the development of orthodontic therapies that increase jaw dimensions rather than the use of tooth removal to relieve crowding.

Jewish genetics in The Forward

Genetics 2009 features a dozen or so articles, mostly focusing on Jewish diseases. I see nothing new in David Goldstein's article on "Jewish Genetic History". The article seems to be a rehashing of old information padded with suggestions for future research.

How did members of various Jewish populations come to look so different from one another

We now know that Jewish populations have substantial Near Eastern ancestry. [. . .] Y chromosomes from different Jewish populations — including those from Europe — usually look like those commonly found in people from the Near East.

The rest of the Jewish genome paints a similar, though less pronounced, picture. [. . .]

Ultimately, [. . .] research is needed to shed further light on this question. Before too long we will be able to sequence people’s entire genomes and track where individual parts of genomes come from. This will likely yield additional insights about the specific genetic inputs into Jewish populations from surrounding communities.

Goldstein attributes the varied phenotypes of Jewish groups exclusively to intermarriage, ignoring the likelihood that selection has played a role.

Latin American "white"

A recent study finds Amerindian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups predominate in the population of Argentina:

Amerindian haplogroups were most frequent in the north and south representing more than 60% of the sequences. A slightly different situation was observed in central Argentina where the Amerindian haplogroups represented less than 50%, and the European contribution was more relevant. [. . .] A minor contribution of African lineages was observed throughout the country.

Autosomal evidence indicates Argentinians harbor substantial Amerindian and minor African admixture.

Regarding autosomal evidence of admixture, the relative European, native American, and West African genetic contributions to the gene pool of La Plata were estimated to be 67.55% (+/-2.7), 25.9% (+/-4.3), and 6.5% (+/-6.4), respectively.

Argentina is generally perceived to be the whitest country in Latin America. See Brazilian or Puerto Rican "whites" if you require further evidence "white" doesn't have the same meaning in Latin America as it does in America.

Moldbug: "Bring back Monarchy so I can live out my dream of becoming a court Jew"

OK, he didn't actually say that. He did say he thinks democracy is "bad for the Jews". In case there was any question about Mencius Moldbug's political priorities:

And there would be a lot more Jews in the world. This is the bottom line on democracy: it's been bad for the Jews. I'm aware that others have other criteria, but this is mine and I like it just fine.

Skulls of Old New Yorkers

H. L. SHAPIRO
Old New Yorkers
A Series of Crania from the Nagel Burying Ground, New York City
AXEPIICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. XIV, NO. 3
JULY-SEPTEMBER. 1930

Among the various elements which make up the heterogeneous population of the United States, there is one which may conveniently be called Old American. Its exact proportion in the present population is unknown, and naturally would vary with the arbitrary standards one might adopt for such a classification. Following, however, the precedent of Hrdlicka (1) , Old Americans are “those American whites who those Americans whose ancestors on each side of the family were born in the United States for at least two generationsin other words, all those whose parents as well as all four grandparents were born in this country. The third native generation of adults means roughly an ancestry on each side of the family of at least 80 to 150 years American.” On the basis of this classification HrdliEka has made in his “Old Americans’’ an important contribution to the study of the somatological characteristics of the oldest American white stock in the population of this country. Unfortunately, up to the present time there have existed no data on the actual ancestors of the population with which HrdliEka was dealing. Consequently, a study on the stability of this physical type was hardly possible. One might, for example, compare Old Americans with the inadequate data on living Englishmen, but that is hardly as satisfactory as a comparison with ancestral whites of the colonial period, for inevitably the question of selection comes up. What has been needed, then, is data on the physical type of the colonial immigrants to the United States.

In this paper I am presenting such data on the actual American ancestors of the old American stock. The principal problems dealt with are the characteristics of a local New York group, their relationship to Old World types, whether they represent a random or selected type, and, finally, if their descendants have preserved the same characters under the influence of the American environment. The answers to these questions are vital in both a practical and a theoretical sense, but they can only be regarded as tentative until vastly more material is available to confirm or alter the conclusions suggested by the material in this paper. [. . .]

Late in November, 1926, I became aware that during the course of some excavations for the 207th Street Yard of the Rapid Transit System of New York City an obliterated burial ground was discovered between 212th Street and 213th Street, near the Harlem River. This district is in the northernmost part of Manhattan and within the present city limits of New York. Upon investigation by the Board of Transportation, it was learned that this site was the former Nagel, or Nagle, Cemetery, [. . .]

The origin of the Nagel cemetery was apparently as a family burial ground for the Nagels and the Dyckmans, who were settled in the neighborhood in the second half of the seventeenth century. [. . .]

The national origin of those buried in the Nagel cemetery is mainly Dutch and English. The principal landholders who inhabited the neighborhood of the Nagel cemetery were, in the late seventeenth century, the Dyckmans, the Nagels, and the Kortrights. Jan Dyckman and Jan Nagel, the original immigrants, were from Westphalia. Kortright was Dutch. Another important neighboring family was the Vermilyeas (Vermilye, Vermilya). The first Vermeille was a French Huguenot, who, after residing in Holland, emigrated to America. By 1800, when the headstones were generally inscribed in this cemetery, the Kortrights were no longer residents of the district. Many of the Nagels had moved to Westchester as a result of the Revolution, but William Nagel, the surviving brother of a large family, continued to live here until after 1800. Of these original families, only the Dyckmans and the Vermilyeas are marked by inscribed headstones. Nevertheless, we know from town records that this district of upper Manhattan was occupied principally by Dutch families in the early days. Intermarriage was the rule, so that the few Huguenots were soon absorbed in the dominant Dutch strains. Genealogical records also indicate that the Dyckmans and Nagels very early married into Dutch families. After Manhattan was taken over by the English in 1674, very few new Dutch settlers migrated to New York. During the eighteenth century the English immigration attained considerable proportions, coming in part from the New England colonies and from the home country. Just when the displacement of the Dutch in upper Manhattan by newer English settlers took place is difficult to estimate. Mr. Bolton is of the opinion that by the second half of the eighteenth century upper Manhattan was already largely English or mixed Dutch-English, for many of the original families were marrying the newer stocks. At any rate, when our information becomes definite, after 1800, the names recorded on headstones are predominantly English.

[. . .] the series, represented in this paper, are in all probability largely of English origin, with some Dutch admixture, and dating from the eighteenth century. [. . .]

In spite of what we might reasonably expect in a former Dutch colony, the physical type of the New Yorker in the eighteenth century was similar in most respects to that of the seventeenth century Londoner and the Lowland Scot. In relation to both these types, the Nagel series appears to represent a group from the same fundamental population, with the discrepancies one would expect in a small sampling. The one notable exception to this broad but tentative generalization is the marked difference in cranial height between the Nagel and London crania. This map be accounted for by regarding the Londoners as variants of the generalized English type in the direction of low-vaulted crania. The other alternative is that in New York the presence of a Dutch strain has made for a cranium much higher than is to be found in the London cousins of the New Yorkers of the eighteenth century. This latter hypothesis is unnecessary, in view of the presence of the same degree of head height in other British series.

[. . .] by estimating cephalic means from the cranial averages of the Nagel series, a cursory comparison with living Old Americans was possible. Recognizing the error inherent in such a procedure, it is interesting to note that, even after a century, apparently the Old Americans have remained similar to their colonial ancestors of New York.

Height of Northern Europeans and Italians in the U.S.

HOWARD V. MEREDITH
Stature of Massachusetts children of North European and Italian ancestry.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTRROPOLOGY, VOL. XXIV, NO. 3
JANUARY-MARCH, 1939

[. . .] The subjects were 237 males and 190 females in attendance at the public schools of Beverly and Revere (two small cities in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts) during the years 1923 to 1934. They represented two racial groups. One hundred and fifty-seven of the males and 124 of the females were of North European ancestry. The remaining eighty males and sixty-six females were of Italian stock.

Two methods had been used to determine the racial stock of the subjects. Initially the Growth Study staff had employed geographical and sociological criteria. Here, the main basis of classification had been the birth-place of the parents, though such items as the language spoken in the home and the family name had also been considered. North European subjects included ‘descendants from the Old American stock together with more recent arrivals from the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States, as well as English speaking Canadians and Newfoundlanders.' Italian subjects, as determined by this approach, were children of parents born in Italy, children from Italian speaking homes, and children whose family names were Italian and whose general physical appearance did not contradict Italian descent.

It had been decided later to differentiate racial groups in a strictly anthropological manner. Criteria involving nationality, language, and culture had here been abandoned. Classification was made solely in terms of combinations for physical items such as skin pigmentation, facial features, eye and hair color, form of hair, and type of build. The disagreements for the two methods were found not to involve more than 4% of the Growth Study cases. [. . .]

1. The mean stature for males of North European descent exceeds that for males of Italian descent over the entire period from 7 to 17 years. In amount, the difference is 4.2 cm. at 7 years, 4.6 cm.. at 10 pears, 4.7 cm. at 13 years, and 4.5 cm. at 17 years. On the whole, during the decade of growth under study the North European males are taller than the Italian males by 4.6 cm., or 1.8 inches. [. . .]

Gebhart, in 1924, published stature means for children of Italian stock living in “a congested Italian district in New York City.” His study was made in connection with a ‘practical health program’ conducted at the Mulberry .Health Center. [. . .]

Stature means for children of North European stock in attendance at private schools in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California were published in 1931 by Gray and Ayres. The subjects of this particular racial grouping were all children of parents born in the United States. Two or three of the grandparents of each child were born in the United States, while the remaining one or two grandparents were born in Canada or in Northwest Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands, British Isles, France or Germany). [. . .]

During the age interval common to the studies of Gebhart and of Gray and Ayres, the mean stature for males of North European descent in attendance at private schools exceeds that for Italian males from a congested urban district by 14.8 cm., or 5.8 inches. This amount of difference is striking. In the opinion of the writer, it constitutes a forceful challenge to intensive investigation of the question, What specific constellations of factors relating to racial descent and socioeconomic status are sufficiently potent to produce such wide divergence in the mean stature of children of school age living in the United States.